Chapter 7: THE GIFTS OF THE KINGDOM

VI. From Vigilance to Peace

1 Although you
can love the Sonship only as one, you can perceive it as fragmented.
It is impossible, however, to see something in part of it that you
will not attribute to all of it. That is why attack is never
discrete, and why it must be relinquished entirely. If it is not
relinquished entirely it is not relinquished at all. Fear and love
make or create, depending on whether the ego or the Holy Spirit
begets or inspires them, but they will return to the mind of
the thinker and they will affect his total perception. That includes
his concept of God, of His creations and of his own. He will not
appreciate any of them if he regards them fearfully. He will
appreciate all of them if he regards them with love.

2 The mind that
accepts attack cannot love. That is because it believes it can
destroy love, and therefore does not understand what love is. If it
does not understand what love is, it cannot perceive itself as
loving. This loses the awareness of being, induces feelings of
unreality and results in utter confusion. Your thinking has done this
because of its power, but your thinking can also save you from this
because its power is not of your making. Your ability to direct your
thinking as you choose is part of its power. If you do not believe
you can do this you have denied the power of your thought, and thus
rendered it powerless in your belief.

3 The
ingeniousness of the ego to preserve itself is enormous, but it stems
from the very power of the mind the ego denies. This means that the
ego attacks what is preserving it, which must result in extreme
anxiety. That is why the ego never recognizes what it is doing. It is
perfectly logical but clearly insane. The ego draws upon the one
source that is totally inimical to its existence for its
existence. Fearful of perceiving the power of this source, it is
forced to depreciate it. This threatens its own existence, a state
which it finds intolerable. Remaining logical but still insane, the
ego resolves this completely insane dilemma in a completely insane
way. It does not perceive its existence as threatened by
projecting the threat onto you, and perceiving your being as
non-existent. This ensures its continuance if you side with it, by
guaranteeing that you will not know your own safety.

4 The ego
cannot afford to know anything. Knowledge is total, and the ego does
not believe in totality. This unbelief is its origin, and while the
ego does not love you it is faithful to its own antecedents,
begetting as it was begotten. Mind always reproduces as it was
produced. Produced by fear, the ego reproduces fear. This is its
allegiance, and this allegiance makes it treacherous to love because
you are love. Love is your power, which the ego must deny.
It must also deny everything this power gives you because it
gives you everything. No one who has everything wants the ego. Its
own maker, then, does not want it. Rejection is therefore the only
decision the ego could possibly encounter, if the mind that made it
knew itself. And if it recognized any part of the Sonship, it
would know itself.

5 The ego
therefore opposes all appreciation, all recognition, all sane
perception and all knowledge. It perceives their threat as total,
because it senses that all commitments the mind makes are total.
Forced, therefore, to detach itself from you, it is willing to attach
itself to anything else. But there is nothing else. The mind
can, however, make up illusions, and if it does so it will believe in
them, because that is how it made them.

6 The Holy
Spirit undoes illusions without attacking them, because He cannot
perceive them at all. They therefore do not exist for Him. He
resolves the apparent conflict they engender by perceiving conflict
as meaningless. I have said before that the Holy Spirit perceives the
conflict exactly as it is, and it is meaningless. The Holy
Spirit does not want you to understand conflict; He wants you to
realize that, because conflict is meaningless, it is not
understandable. As I have already said, understanding brings
appreciation and appreciation brings love. Nothing else can be
understood, because nothing else is real and therefore nothing else
has meaning.

7 If you will
keep in mind what the Holy Spirit offers you, you cannot be vigilant
for anything but God and His Kingdom. The only reason you
may find this hard to accept is because you may still think there is
something else. Belief does not require vigilance unless it is
conflicted. If it is, there are conflicting components within it that
have led to a state of war, and vigilance has therefore become
essential. Vigilance has no place in peace. It is necessary against
beliefs that are not true, and would never have been called upon by
the Holy Spirit if you had not believed the untrue. When you believe
something, you have made it true for you. When you believe what God
does not know, your thought seems to contradict His, and this makes
it appear as if you are attacking Him.

8 I have
repeatedly emphasized that the ego does believe it can attack God,
and tries to persuade you that you have done this. If the mind cannot
attack, the ego proceeds perfectly logically to the belief that you
must be a body. By not seeing you as you are, it can see itself as it
wants to be. Aware of its weakness the ego wants your allegiance, but
not as you really are. The ego therefore wants to engage your mind in
its own delusional system, because otherwise the light of your
understanding would dispel it. It wants no part of truth, because the
ego itself is not true. If truth is total, the untrue cannot exist.
Commitment to either must be total; they cannot coexist in your mind
without splitting it. If they cannot coexist in peace, and if you
want peace, you must give up the idea of conflict entirely and for
all time. This requires vigilance only as long as you do not
recognize what is true. While you believe that two totally
contradictory thought systems share truth, your need for vigilance is
apparent.

9 Your mind is
dividing its allegiance between two kingdoms, and you are totally
committed to neither. Your identification with the Kingdom is totally
beyond question except by you, when you are thinking insanely. What
you are is not established by your perception, and is not influenced
by it at all. Perceived problems in identification at any level are
not problems of fact. They are problems of understanding, since their
presence implies a belief that what you are is up to you to decide.
The ego believes this totally, being fully committed to it. It is not
true. The ego therefore is totally committed to untruth, perceiving
in total contradiction to the Holy Spirit and to the knowledge of
God.

10 You can be
perceived with meaning only by the Holy Spirit because your being
is the knowledge of God. Any belief you accept apart from
this will obscure God's Voice in you, and will therefore obscure
God to you. Unless you perceive His creation truly you cannot know
the Creator, since God and His creation are not separate. The oneness
of the Creator and the creation is your wholeness, your sanity and
your limitless power. This limitless power is God's gift to you,
because it is what you are. If you dissociate your mind from it you
are perceiving the most powerful force in the universe as if it were
weak, because you do not believe you are part of it.

11 Perceived
without your part in it, God's creation is seen as weak, and
those who see themselves as weakened do attack. The attack must be
blind, however, because there is nothing to attack. Therefore they
make up images, perceive them as unworthy and attack them for their
unworthiness. That is all the world of the ego is. Nothing. It has no
meaning. It does not exist. Do not try to understand it because, if
you do, you are believing that it can be understood and is therefore
capable of being appreciated and loved. That would justify its
existence, which cannot be justified. You cannot make the meaningless
meaningful. This can only be an insane attempt.

12 Allowing
insanity to enter your mind means that you have not judged sanity as
wholly desirable. If you want something else you will make something
else, but because it is something else, it will attack your thought
system and divide your allegiance. You cannot create in this divided
state, and you must be vigilant against this divided state because
only peace can be extended. Your divided mind is blocking the
extension of the Kingdom, and its extension is your joy. If you do
not extend the Kingdom, you are not thinking with your Creator and
creating as He created.

13 In this
depressing state the Holy Spirit reminds you gently that you are sad
because you are not fulfilling your function as co-creator with God,
and are therefore depriving yourself of joy. This is not God's
choice but yours. If your mind could be out of accord with God's,
you would be willing without meaning. Yet because God's Will is
unchangeable, no conflict of will is possible. This is the Holy
Spirit's perfectly consistent teaching. Creation, not separation,
is your will because it is God's, and nothing that
opposes this means anything at all. Being a perfect accomplishment,
the Sonship can only accomplish perfectly, extending the joy in which
it was created, and identifying itself with both its Creator and its
creations, knowing They are One.